VMware woos power users and IT pros with Fusion and Workstation upgrades

Bid to unseat Parallels plays to VMware's enterprise strengths.

VMware has generally played second fiddle to Parallels in the market for running Windows virtual machines on the Mac, an arena largely consisting of home users. But VMware has never been an also-ran in the enterprise, where its top-notch server and desktop software has made the virtualization vendor a giant for most of its 15-year history.

The company began merging its enterprise chops with its consumer virtualization tools one year ago with a professional version of Fusion, its software for running Windows and other operating systems on OS X. The pro version has all the same capabilities as the base Fusion platform, along with tools for IT shops to securely provision virtual machines to employees and contractors.

With Fusion 6, a new product that's being announced today, VMware is making Mac virtualization even more IT-friendly. VMware today is also releasing version 10 of Workstation, the desktop virtualization platform designed for power users on Windows and Linux. Notably, Workstation now has a virtual accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, and ambient light sensor. This will make it easier for developers to test applications on Windows 8 tablets.

Fusion 6 Professional gives IT shops more options in deploying restricted virtual machines than Fusion 5 did. For example, a virtual machine can be set to expire on a specific date and time, useful for providing VMs to contractors or for using VMs to show demos of software to people outside the company. Also, a new "single virtual machine mode" can be enabled to prevent users from creating new virtual machines or accessing features IT shops would prefer they not touch.

Fusion 6 Pro adds "linked clones," in which multiple copies of a virtual machine can be created without duplicating the entire thing. This feature, borrowed from Workstation, saves a lot of disk space. Developers could use this to test applications on various configurations of an operating system without using nearly as much storage as they otherwise might.

Upgrades to Fusion that apply to both the home and professional versions include support for OS X Mavericks as a host operating system and for Windows 8.1 as a guest OS. It's not that you can't run Fusion 5 with Windows 8.1 or Mavericks, it's just that Fusion 6 can better take advantage of the operating systems' new capabilities.

Mavericks' upgrades for users with multiple monitors come into play here. Fusion could already run Windows on multiple displays in previous versions, but with Fusion 6 it can use an HDTV connected to an Apple TV as a Windows display via the AirPlay wireless technology, VMware product marketing manager Nicolas Rochard told Ars. Fusion 6 can also use Mavericks' enhanced dictation abilities in Windows virtual machines.

With Windows 8.1 as a guest on Fusion 6, users can run "Windows Store [i.e. Metro] applications side-by-side with your Mac applications," VMware said in its announcement. "With Fusion 6, you can access Windows Store applications in Launchpad or the Applications folder and put them in the dock in Unity mode."

Enlarge/ Almost like a Start menu, Fusion provides easy access to applications within virtual machines from the Mac's menu bar.

VMware

Fusion 6 has upgrades designed to take advantage of the latest Intel chips and solid-state drives on Mac hardware. "We let Windows 8 virtual machines know when they're running on an SSD so they don't have to perform unnecessary disk defragmentation tasks," Rochard said.

Virtual machines can now be bigger than ever before, with up to 16 virtual CPUs, 8TB of virtual disk space, and 64GB of memory. Previously, the limits were 8 CPUs, 2TB of disk, and 8GB of memory. There are also some user interface tweaks to make installing virtual machines easier.

As a bonus, Fusion Professional comes with VMware Player 6 Plus. This is a commercially licensed version of Player, a virtualization product for Windows and Linux that is traditionally free, but authorized only for home use. With Fusion Pro and Player Plus, IT shops can create restricted virtual machines in Fusion and deploy them to either Fusion or Player, covering Macs, Windows, and Linux.

This provides a secure way to let businesses support some of those Windows XP applications that just won't go away. "We expect to be very interesting to many customers who are facing the end of life of XP," VMware Workstation Director Jason Joel told Ars. "In April, Microsoft will no longer support XP. The good news is XP will run very well in a virtual machine. We expect to run Windows XP basically forever."

Workstation, the granddaddy of them all

A desktop virtualization product for Windows and Linux, Workstation is the product that got it all started for VMware in 1999, a year after the company's founding. Fusion and Workstation both use the same virtualization engine that ships with vSphere, VMware's flagship product for server virtualization, Joel said. But Workstation is generally targeted at an audience with higher technical requirements than Fusion's, such as developers and software engineers.

Workstation 10 supports virtual machines with up to 16 virtual CPUs, 8TB of disk, and 64GB of memory, just like Fusion. One interesting addition comes in the form of tablet sensors, "the first ever virtual accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, and ambient light sensor to enable applications running in a virtual machine to respond when a user juggles their tablet," VMware said. This is in addition to multi-touch support added last year.

"With these sensors available, you are able to create and run all your position-aware applications," Joel said. "If you put Marble Madness into a virtual machine and run it on a Surface Pro, you can tilt the Surface Pro around and your marble will respond appropriately."

This feature is designed mostly for building Windows tablet applications. Android isn't officially supported by VMware, but Joel said users can install Android on Workstation if they're willing to do a little manual configuration.

Expiring virtual machines and the SSD integration in Fusion also make their way into Workstation 10. Other new Workstation features include a virtual SATA controller and improved support for USB 3, which should speed up large file transfers.

VMware boosted the number of virtual networks that can be created with Workstation to accommodate the complex deployments that its customers need. Customers are building "entire cloud environments or VDI [virtual desktop infrastructure] environments, or even hybrid ESX/Hyper-V combinations that they're trying to develop operational software for," Joel said. There are also "complicated configurations with load balancers, and with firewalls and multiple storage systems and multiple database/Web server configurations."

Workstation, like Fusion, supports all the latest Linux distributions. But the big driver is Windows 8.1, Joel said. "When Windows 8 originally launched, we got very few questions about it," he said. "But since the 8.1 preview has come out, we've seen a tremendous amount of growth in the number of people using it as well as the number of questions we're getting, and feedback we've received on the enhancements we've put in for 8.1 support. We have added support for the metro apps, putting them in the Unity menus, and we've added support for conversion of physical to virtual Windows 8 machines, which is something we haven't had previously."

How much it all costs, showdown with Parallels

Fusion 6 will be available today from VMware's website for $59.99, while Fusion 6 Professional will cost $129.99. People who bought Fusion 5 on August 1 or later can upgrade for free. Upgrades from Fusion 4 and 5 cost $49.99 (or $69.99 to upgrade to Fusion 6 Pro).

While Fusion 6 Pro comes with Player Plus, this version of Player will also be sold on its own for $99. This may help VMware recoup some money from consumers who have used Fusion for work, perhaps not knowing that it wasn't licensed for commercial use. "We very well know there are millions of people out there who have [done that], and our intent is to provide them with a path to become legitimate," Joel said.

Workstation 10 will cost $249 for new buyers, with upgrades from Workstation 8 or 9 costing $119. Anyone who bought Workstation 9 on August 1 or later can upgrade for free.

As is typical, VMware rival Parallels released the latest version of its virtual machine software for Macs last week. In our detailed showdown of Parallels and Fusion last year, Ars writer Dave Girard wrote that Parallels justified its higher price with "solid performance, far superior Linux OpenGL support, and existing feature set."

Stay tuned for another Parallels vs. Fusion showdown after Dave has spent his usual copious amounts of time testing every possible detail of the two products.

Promoted Comments

If anyone from VMware is reading this, I have 2 simple requests of VMware Workstation.

1) Keep up with Linux kernel releases. Give us small patches to keep things running. The community ones work... most of the time, but official support would be better.

2) Add support for hardware video acceleration for Linux hosts. I've read some people getting it to work by jumping through some hoops, but it's a long road with no guarantees. Don't forget some people run Bumblebee.